As usage of computers and computer related services increases, storage requirements for enterprises and Internet related infrastructure companies are exploding at an unprecedented rate. Industry estimates indicate that storage capacity is doubling every nine to twelve months. Enterprise applications, both at the corporate and departmental level, are causing this huge growth in storage requirements. Recent user surveys indicate that the average enterprise has been experiencing a 52% growth rate per year in storage. In addition, over 25% of the enterprises experienced more than 50% growth per year in storage needs, with some enterprises registering as much as 500% growth in storage requirements.
Administrators face increasing amounts of data and are under tremendous pressure to reduce downtime due to data not being readily available, or not available at all. Acts such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, increase compliance requirements and specify that data should be available at all times and should be produced on demand within a reasonable amount of time. Adding together, each minute of downtime can equate to thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue. Moreover, enterprises are under increasing pressure to maintain business continuance in light of a disaster and/or other unforeseen or foreseen disruptions. There is also a need for system confidence whereby administrators and users are confident that future needs will not outgrow the system.
Today, several approaches exist for networked storage, including hardware-based systems. These architectures work well but are generally expensive to acquire, maintain, and manage, thus limiting their use to larger businesses. Small and mid-sized businesses might not have the resources, including money and expertise, to utilize the available scalable storage solutions. Thus, currently available solutions do not provide fault tolerance, high availability, and scalability for small and mid-size business. This is true even though the data generated is equally important and necessary for the continued maintenance and viability of such businesses as it is for larger businesses.
Therefore, to overcome these as well as other challenges related to networked storage, there exists a need for a solution that requires a minimal amount of management, is fault tolerant, scalable, can utilize commodity off-the-shelf hardware and is easy to install, implement, and use.